The Battle Over Reconstruction

On the morning of July 4, 1864, as Congress was preparing to adjourn for the summer, Abraham Lincoln was busy in an office at the Capitol signing bills. Senator Charles Sumner hovered nearby “in a state of intense anxiety.” George Boutwell, a representative from Massachusetts, paced nervously. Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan kept asking anyone who would listen if one particular bill had been signed. Told no, he spoke with Lincoln who, according to the president’s secretary John Hay, said, “this bill was placed before me a few minutes before Congress adjourns. It is a matter of too much importance to be swallowed in that way.”

The bill in question was the Wade-Davis bill, co-sponsored by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland and passed on July 2, in the closing hours of the session. After months of discussion, Congress had settled on a plan of reconstruction that, in some ways, differed starkly from the plan set forth by the president in his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction issued on Dec. 8, 1863 – and that would set the tone for federal policy toward the defeated South for more than a decade.

The final bill called for the appointment by the president, with the Senate’s consent, of a provisional governor for each state in rebellion. Once military resistance had been suppressed, all white male citizens would be enrolled and asked to swear an oath to support the Constitution; if 50 percent of them took the oath (as opposed to 10 percent under Lincoln’s plan), the provisional governor would call a constitutional convention.

Only those who could take the Ironclad Oath adopted by Congress on July 2, 1862, could vote for or serve as convention delegates. This disqualified people who had held “any office, civil or military office, state or Confederate,” during the war or “voluntarily borne arms against the United States.” The bill further mandated that the new state constitution must declare that slavery “is forever prohibited,” repudiate the Confederate debt, and bar from voting for or serving as governor or a state legislator anyone who held civil or military positions, except those that were ministerial or a rank lower than colonel.

In certain ways, the plan was a moderate one. It did not enfranchise blacks and it did not adopt the radical Republican theories of state suicide or territorialization, whereby the states had lost their place in the Union. Nevertheless, the bill threatened the progress on reconstruction already being made under Lincoln’s plan. It encapsulated Representative Davis’s belief that “it is the exclusive prerogative of Congress — of Congress, and not the President — to determine what is and what is not the established government of the State.”

Furthermore, the bill would delay reconstruction until after the rebellion had ended. “It is not safe,” Davis warned, “to confide the vast authority of State governments to the doubtful loyalty of the rebel States until armed rebellion shall have been trampled in the dust.” If Lincoln signed the measure, the result would be the abandonment of progress toward reconstruction already made in Louisiana and Arkansas, and a repudiation of his belief that re-establishing loyal state governments would hasten the end of the rebellion.

Because the bill was delivered to Lincoln only two days before Congress adjourned, he could kill it simply by not acting on it – a move called a pocket veto. Few expected him to do that. So when Jesse Old Norton, an Illinois Congressman, heard the news of Lincoln’s intention to let it die, he said, “it was impossible & would be fatal.” The pocket veto was rarely used, and through weeks of debate on the bill Lincoln had not expressed any reservations about it.

Chandler, watching as the president signed various measures, said failure to sign the Wade-Davis bill would hurt Lincoln in the upcoming presidential election. Besides, he argued, it prohibited slavery in the reconstructed areas; that was all that should matter.

Lincoln responded, “that is the point on which I doubt the authority of Congress to act.”

But “it is no more than you have done yourself,” Chandler exclaimed.

“I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds,” Lincoln said, “which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress.”

Chandler stormed out. Lincoln then explained to the room that, as he read the bill, it asserted that the states in rebellion were no longer states; it made “the fatal admission … that states whenever they please may of their own motion dissolve their connection with the Union.”

Lincoln’s misreading of this aspect of the bill reflected his disdain for theoretical issues. He had “laboriously endeavored” to avoid “a merely metaphysical question,” he said, apparently so much so that he saw it even when it was not present. He would not worry about the political consequences of his action, and he would not abandon the efforts at reconstruction begun under his December proclamation. He told Hay, “I must keep some standard of principle fixed within myself.”

Given the consternation his actions caused many Republicans, and perhaps hoping to unify the party as it approached the November election, Lincoln decided a few days later to issue a proclamation explaining why he did not sign the bill.

Emphasizing that his purpose was to restore the rebellious states to their “proper practical relation” to the Union, Lincoln said he was “unprepared, by a formal approval of the Bill, to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration.” He also was “unprepared” to set aside the free-state constitutions in Louisiana and Arkansas. Furthermore, he did not believe Congress had “a constitutional competency … to abolish slavery in States,” but was hoping for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery throughout the nation. And yet, he declared, “I am fully satisfied with the system for restoration contained in the Bill, as one very proper plan for the loyal people of any State choosing to adopt it.”

With that sentence, Lincoln sounded generous and accommodating, but he knew, of course, that the concession had no meaning: What state would choose sterner measures (an ironclad oath and majority requirement, for example) offered by Congress when the president’s plan held out less demanding terms? The Daily National Intelligencer newspaper marveled at the preposterous logic: “So we have the anomaly presented to the world of a ‘very proper plan’ involving an unconstitutional feature — a plan which has no legal validity, (because lacking the President’s official approval in the only way prescribed by the Constitution,) and yet one under which the people of certain States are invited to act.”

Congressman Thaddeus Stevens expressed the thoughts of many radicals in his reaction to Lincoln’s explanation of his actions. Seeing electoral politics at work, he said, “What an infamous proclamation! The Pres is determined to have the electoral votes of the seceded states — at least of Tenn Ark — Lou & Flor — Pehaps also of S. Car — The idea of pocketing a bill and then issuing a proclamation as to how far he will conform to it, is matched only by signing a bill and then sending in a veto — How little of the right of war and the law of nations our Prest. Knows.” Stevens concluded his rant, “But what are we to do? Condemn privately and applaud publicly.”

Henry Winter Davis did not feel the same way and on Aug. 5, through a manifesto in The New York Tribune, he and Wade condemned Lincoln’s pocket veto and proclamation of explanation as “a defeat of the will of the people by an Executive perversion of the constitution.” They denounced the new governments in Louisiana and Arkansas as shadow governments that exist as “mere creatures of his will.” By killing the bill, Lincoln “holds the electoral vote of the rebel States at the dictation of his personal ambition.” His claim that Congress could not act against slavery was “unintelligible.” And his final concession that the plan was proper as a “system of restoration” was a “studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people.”

The only group thrilled by the manifesto was the Peace Democrats, who virulently opposed Lincoln and could not get over their good fortune of having two radical Republicans attack him on nearly the same grounds as they did. The New York Herald observed that nothing Democrats “have uttered in derogation of Mr. Lincoln has approached in bitterness and force the denunciations which Messrs Wade and Davis, shining lights of the Republican party, have piled up in this manifesto.”

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Most of the Republican press denounced their manifesto as of “questionable” taste, the “result of soreheadedness,” a “treacherous and malignant attempt to stab a President whom they profess to support.” “The result of the Manifesto,” thought The Albany Journal, “is simply to make still more clear the wisdom of the President’s course.” Even most of their fellow radicals felt Wade and Davis had gone too far.

Lincoln, for his part, professed that “he had not, and probably should not read” the manifesto and had no desire to take part in the controversy. But Secretary of State William Seward read it to him, and Lincoln remarked, “I would like to know whether these men intend openly to oppose my election — the document looks that way.” He was more agitated than he let on. The former treasury agent Benjamin Rush Plumly reported that Lincoln’s “blood is up on the Wade & Winter Davis protest.”

If Wade and Davis believed their actions would give Lincoln pause on reconstruction in Louisiana, they were mistaken. Four days after they issued their manifesto, Lincoln wrote to Gen. Nathaniel Banks to congratulate him on the adoption of the new Louisiana constitution and to pledge support for its ratification. Reconstruction in Louisiana would remain a battleground between the president and Congress through 1864 and the first months of 1865. Indeed, Lincoln would devote what turned out to be his final speech on April 11, 1865, to the subject of restoring Louisiana to the Union.

The brouhaha over the pocket veto of the Wade-Davis bill did not, however, lead to an irreconcilable breach between the president and Congress. Of more immediate concern than reconstruction in July and August 1864 was Lincoln’s re-election. Wade and Davis would come back into the fold and endorse the president (prompted in part by Lincoln’s purge of conservative Montgomery Blair from the cabinet in September). Lincoln would also survive an attempt by some Republicans to dump him for another candidate.

But the moderate Thurlow Weed declared, at the end of August, “As things stand now, Mr. Lincoln’s re-election is an impossibility.” Henry J. Raymond, the editor of The New York Times and chair of the National Union Executive Committee, warned Lincoln: “The tide is against us.” Added the New York diarist George Templeton Strong, “Lincoln manifestly loses ground every day. The most zealous Republican partisans talk doubtfully of his chances.”

Lincoln knew the score. “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten,” he was overheard as saying, “but I do and unless some great change takes place badly beaten.” Any further plans for wartime reconstruction would have to await the outcome of the presidential election and the return of Congress in December.

Louis P. Masur is a distinguished professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University. His books include “Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union” and the forthcoming “Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion, 1861-1865.”

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